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Top 7 Common SEO Mistakes

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Most of your quality traffic comes from search engines, therefore when building a website it is important to know the hints, tips and tricks that will give you better placement in the search engines. Mistakes can actually hurt your site in the search engines without you even realizing it. I have come across a number of websites in which beginners not yet familiar with search engine optimization make the same common mistakes.

Are you making these seven common mistakes too?

Irrelevant Keywords: Many Webmasters use irrelevant Keywords. Be sure to choose the right keywords that relate to your company. Be specific. Think about the words that web surfers will be typing to find your website. Inventory overture <http://inventory.uk.overture.com> keyword selector Tool is one of the best-known services for helping you choose the right keywords. Use Inventory overture keyword selector Tool to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines.

No Back Links: Backlinks are extremely important to your website's rankings, therefore this should be one of your main priorities. The easiest way to get back links is to ask for them. Visit sites related to your website and request a link exchange.

Bad Web design: Design mistakes can hurt your website. A mistake that I found many new webmasters making is they are not building their website to ensure that it appears correctly at different screen resolutions. Your website will be the first impression and remember that first impressions are everything. Can you afford to loose visitors because your website isn't viewing correctly on their monitor? I for one use a screen resolution of 800 x 600. If you design your site to be viewable only by a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, I have an annoying horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page and I have to scroll horizontally, just to see the entire content of your page. That right there is a turn off. There are many other web design mistakes, but we'll cover that in another article.

Overuse of images and flash animations/ having too many Graphics on your page: While graphics and flash may be pleasing to the eyes, too many graphics won't help you get a better ranking. In fact Google and other search engines cannot read the content of an image. Flash only pages have no text; therefore there is nothing for the search engines to read.

Not Utilizing your Title Tag: Title Tags are really important for search engines. A common mistake that I see many new webmasters making is that they leave the title tag empty or use irrelevant words.

Your title tag is the first thing a search engine's spider sees on your page.

You shouldn't put only your company name in the title tag, but ad keywords about your company. Use Inventory overture keyword selector Tool to find related keywords.

No alt attribute in tags: As I stated above, search engines cannot spider images. Therefore the alt image tag helps the search engines understand the subject of the image. Be sure to include the alt attribute with every image.

Bad Anchor text: Whatever you do, don't use "click here" or other non-descriptive link text. I'm guilty of this one myself. Proper anchor text can help your ranking. Your anchor text should describe the page that you're linking to. For example if you're linking to this article, your anchor text might read, "Seven Common SEO Mistakes by Rose DesRochers" instead of "Click Here to read this article." Anchor text is extremely important to your ranking.

Rose DesRochers is the assistant administrator of Invision Graphics Webmaster forum [http://www.invision.graphics.com] is the ultimate webmaster resource center offering you free downloads, webmaster resource links, top sites, a free link directory, and a friendly support forum. Rose DesRochers is also the founder of one of Writer's Digest 101 best websites for writers - Today's Woman Writing Community http://www.todays-woman.net.